^a particularly fallacious and overblown selection from this gigantic movie, all of which is at youtube.

This is like a compilation of every left wing article ever in the form of a really long (nearly 2 and half hour) documentary. If you've ever heard of how Monsanto does stuff with seeds, or how the general guy stopped the business people from taking over FDR's govt, or how human bovine growth hormone is in the milk, it's all here and more. Depending on your ideology you might like all of it or none of it or some of it but I tend to think elements of it have aged better than others. Then again I believe in the total abolition of government and privitization of like everything so I'm not the best judge of what is going on in the public street if you will. I watch the news though. and 60 minutes.

The whole thing is that corporations are bad and the moment the country jumped the shark was when corporations seized on the 14 amendment and declared themselves "people". They use a clever checklist thing throughout the movie showing how if a coporation WAS a person it would be a psychopathic one by most any definition. Being left wing it's pretty good on artistic merit, thats who all these artists are. and they corral in all the big rock stars of their movment like Michael Moore, CHomsky, the late Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein. It flows smoothly and the editing is clear and there are lots and lots of little colorful images and old cartoonsand whatnot.

I think the stuff about the factory farms and some of the environmental stuff has stayed in focus and people are begining to turn away from the old ways in these regards, albeit slowly (and largley of their own volition and not due to the lawsuits and activism these guys go on about).

Being that this was released in 2003, some of the economic stuff probably seems pretty utopian now. Sweat shops are shown as the ...sweat shops they are. really awful places. Yet now, of course, americans are assed out broke and need stuff as cheap as they can get it. Also, No solutions to the poverty of the third world are offered. The fact is if these people didn't work at sweatshops they would probably starve or be forced into the drug trade and/or other even more dangerous and dehumanizing industries. I don't see how you can stop a sweat shop without putting somethign in it's place and call yourself a humanitarian. That whle side of the story is not dealt with really ever.

I was also pretty unimpressed by their "expose" that corporate philanthropy...benefits corporations!! These two kids allow some mortagage company or something to use them as a billboard. THey go on talk shows with the company on their shirt or something. They made enough to go to college. Again, Were the editors of The Nation going to pay for these kids to go to college otherwise? Another time they show how Pfizer is paying for all these safety measures and so forth in a Queens neighborhood where they have a factory of some kind or headquarters. The professor guy thinks the TAXPAYER should decide where that money goes, not some private company. Sorry but 1. the taxpaper doesn't decide anything and 2. the state is not going to take money and spend it making some random neighborhood safer and nicer. Whatever their priorities are (wars, subsidies for friends and various lobbies, being annoying) it's not anything like that.

I could go on forever but in general I'd say this is well done, has a lot of interesting stories but some of it is more relevent than other parts and depending on your political / social interests or beliefs this can be pretty frustrating. Plus, some of the real interesting things, like a story about how Monsanto colluded with FOX to get FOX to kill one of its own investigative pieces, are buried an hour and a half into the thing.